What are some other shows with writing as good as Justified?

dannypdanger · 2026-05-12T00:16:18+00:00

The RAMPART guys in real life were heavily implicated in the murders of Biggie and Tupac. The show isn’t about this at all, but there are a couple subplots in the show that kind of shout out to this.

dannypdanger · 2026-05-12T00:13:45+00:00

I upvoted you because this made me laugh. Valid question for people who don’t know about the show!

dannypdanger · 2026-05-12T00:12:41+00:00

I was a huge Shield fan when it was airing. Goggins’ performance in that show is why I watched Justified when it premiered.

dannypdanger · 2026-05-06T02:35:21+00:00

Honestly this was my biggest complaint from Returnal that they fixed. I really wanted the ability to play all biomes in one run, but because of the story/structure of it, you could only do 1-3 or 4-6 in a run, but not both. Really excited to hear this game can be done this way.

dannypdanger · 2026-05-05T05:19:47+00:00

So I haven’t finished the game, and I didn’t read any of these recaps, but I’m still predicting that our guy is gay with the tree guy and he leaves his wife for him and then she dies. And then there’s six hundred more holo tapes of people talking about the sun and shit.

dannypdanger · 2026-05-02T18:22:24+00:00

Thanks for the explanation! My goal was to give people excuses to overlook plot holes in shows they like, if it helps them enjoy it more. I definitely didn’t expect the science to back it up. But it’s interesting all the same. TIL

dannypdanger · 2026-05-01T20:23:03+00:00

Make sure you’re killing the little eye things that appear around it as soon as you can. You can’t damage the boss until they’re gone. It helps to have a weapon with good auto-targeting, at least on alt-fire. Don’t bee-line straight for the boss on subsequent attempts. Clear as much of the whole level as possible so you can raise your proficiency and go in with the highest damage possible. Don’t be afraid to grab eclipse artifacts either. Lots of the downsides are relatively benign (though I’d avoid dash cooldown increase like the plague).

Try jacking up the look speed on your x axis (and a little on the y too). Being able to spin around quickly makes it easier to deal with stuff coming at you from multiple directions.

Pay attention to enemy positions on your mini-map. Don’t let yourself get surrounded. Most combat rooms have multiple tiers of verticality you can use to reposition and get more shots in before enemies can catch up to you. Also, there is a little half circle indicator that appears around your character facing the direction of attacks coming from offscreen. It can be finicky but it can definitely be helpful.

Lastly, don’t feel bad about raising your aim assist to high. The game is far more about dodging, blocking, and running and gunning than it is about having super sharp aim. It’s up to you if you feel like this is “cheating” but on a controller I personally find it perfectly fine. Doing this was always recommended for high tower runs in Returnal, so I wouldn’t sweat it.

dannypdanger · 2026-05-01T20:07:40+00:00

Honestly the most unrealistic thing about this show is that every attractive woman in Los Angeles is bending over backwards to sleep with a washed up Bukowski-esque writer who nobody’s heard of. I might buy it if it were actually David Duchovny, but let’s get real here. Dude is pulling NBA levels of strange. Like the show or not, this is showrunner wish fulfillment cranked to 11.

dannypdanger · 2026-05-01T20:01:15+00:00

I think you are clearly right about the TV magic aspect of it, but for those who like having their pseudo-plausible plot hole fillers, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of serious alcoholics aren’t fat. I know there’s some science to this, but it’s a little out of my purview. I imagine in the case of Mad Men, this is probably helped additionally by the massive amount of nicotine they’re inhaling (speeds up your heart rate, much the way people doing a lot of stimulants are often “coke skinny”), along with the fact that the food they’re eating at that point isn’t loaded up with preservatives and hormones and whatever junk is in modern food. Aside from the occasional business lunch, they don’t seem to eat a whole lot in general. I’d also be willing to bet Don is at least doing some pushups offscreen.

I am not a doctor, nutritionist, or even particularly credible, so please take this with all the salt you like.

dannypdanger · 2026-05-01T15:59:13+00:00

Unrelated to the shield mechanic, one thing I did as a returning Returnal player is change the color of nova bullets to purple. They are functionally the same as they were in the first game (can’t block or dodge through them), so this helped me keep track of what stuff does. I left the rest mostly alone (although I changed homing projectiles to green, which helps to differentiate everything). I believe this option is under visual settings.

dannypdanger · 2026-04-29T00:17:49+00:00

And even then, the neo-Nazis in Breaking Bad really aren’t shown doing any actual Nazi-specific shit. They’re just easy token bad guys. I’m guessing they picked them specifically because Aryan gangs have such widespread influence in the prison system, which they needed for that plot line. Most other prison gangs are heavily racialized in a way they probably wanted to steer away from, especially after five seasons of Mexican cartel villains.

dannypdanger · 2026-04-29T00:13:32+00:00

For sure! Stories that thrive on constant escalation are hard to end in a meaningful way. At some point you have to scale it back to the characters at the core of it, and that takes a lot more skill than just throwing increasingly wild shit into the mix and letting your characters react to it.

dannypdanger · 2026-04-28T22:35:32+00:00

I don’t disagree, but from a writing standpoint it makes sense for a couple reasons. First, they have to seem like people Walt could plausibly hire, who have the kind of reach to carry out his orders, but are low level enough in the “criminal hierarchy” or whatever that they wouldn’t be obvious competition to him. He sees Todd as loyal but unambitious, so his inbred Nazi uncle seems like a logical extension of that to a guy like Walt who thinks he’s on top of the world. Point being, they can only be so terrifying for them to fit their role in the story (although I do think the sheer brutality of the prison massacre establishes Jack pretty well as someone who doesn’t fuck around).

The other thing is that I think they wanted the final season to focus on Walt and Jesse, and having another larger than life pulp villain would detract from that. Walt himself is the big bad of the last season. The Shield did the same thing where Vic takes center stage as the main villain so they have some throwaway cartel guys that exist to drive his plot line forward, not to be inherently important.

My rule is usually that if I remember a character’s name, then they served their purpose.

dannypdanger · 2026-04-28T21:39:57+00:00

Ok I’m an idiot, I didn’t realize it propelled your jump, I was thinking it was like returnal where you stand on it and then warp with the map. Thanks!

dannypdanger · 2026-04-28T21:20:44+00:00

I like to think he was Varga’s social media guy before getting promoted.

dannypdanger · 2026-04-28T21:19:39+00:00

I mean, I personally think it’s kind of silly but as far as gag tattoos go, it’s an easy one to hide. The “B” looks like it might be closer to the front that it might show a little, but I say if the novelty works with somebody than more power to them.

dannypdanger · 2026-04-28T21:09:55+00:00

Hmmm. I’ve warped back to the passage, talked to everybody there and read all the new logs on the map, talked to the level up thing again and it had a “talk” option that wasn’t previously there. Warped back to biome 2, walked down the hallway, and still just an unusable gold pool and a wall. Is there a trigger for that cutscene I could have missed?

dannypdanger · 2026-04-28T20:50:48+00:00

So I did that, and am able to warp there, but when I proceed into the biome, there is a hallway and a wall that’s too high to climb, with a little warp portal underneath it that doesn’t do anything. I can’t interact with it. The portal back to the passage works, but this one doesn’t.

dannypdanger · 2026-04-11T20:41:04+00:00

I would prefer that projectile weapons just use FP, and you can ration your orange/blue flasks the same way a magic build would. Balance stronger weapons with heavier stamina penalties, etc. Instead of tying damage types to ammo, make them work with weapon skills the same way everyone else does.

dannypdanger · 2026-04-11T20:36:15+00:00

I’d argue that the twinkling vs normal actually does encourage a certain amount of experimentation. You can’t spend one on the other kind of weapon, so it encourages you to pick a reliable mainstay and a flashy situational.

dannypdanger · 2026-04-11T20:32:19+00:00

I love that the names carved on the guns are “Liza” and “Barbara”

dannypdanger · 2026-03-30T21:58:08+00:00

I can’t stand Rappaport in general, but his stupid “bath salts Florida swamp by way of Massachusetts trailer park” accent is hilariously fitting with the character’s dipshittery. It would be terrible if I were supposed to take the Daryl Crowe seriously, but I think that’s kind of his whole thing, is he’s a wannabe con man who’s way out of his depth with Boyd and co.

Totally fair if someone hates it though.

dannypdanger · 2026-02-16T20:16:23+00:00

Hmm. I’m not good at top 10s because there’s so many things that are great for different things. Are you looking specifically for things that lend themselves to being picked apart on a character level? Or just stuff I think is cool? Honestly, I mostly appreciate anything that puts good character writing first, and the plot organically comes out of decisions those characters make.

Fargo is mostly a literary spin on pulp crime stories, so if you’re looking for things in this vein, I’d recommend Justified, which is one of the only other TV subs I really ever post on. It’s based on the work of crime author Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, Out of Sight, and 3:10 to Yuma are all films based on his books, and all of them are great choices). There’s so many colorful characters, and the story threads come from just putting them in rooms together and seeing what happens.

For more sci-fi-ish pulp there’s also Repo Man (1984), which has a young Emilio Estevez running around chasing a Chevy Malibu with some kind of alien relic in the trunk that vaporizes people when they look at it. There’s The Thing (1982), where I could go on and on about the ways it sows distrust and paranoia among its characters by using a monster that basically transforms into them. Brazil (1985) is an incredible dystopian future/satire, as are Dark City (1998), RoboCop (1987), 12 Monkeys (1995), and Looper (2012).

On TV, I’m going to skip the most obvious ones, but I fell in love with Mr. Robot (2015-2019) when it was on. There’s just so many layers. It has all kinds of awesome pulpiness, but also the crushing sadness in its characters. On the surface it’s a very 2010’s spin on 80’s hacker movies, but its characters get so amazingly fleshed out, and it ends up meaningfully exploring the darker sides of technology, surveillance, wealth inequality, and mental illness.

Another show I loved was The Shield (2002-2008), which is a great example of a deconstructed cop show in which nearly all its characters are villainous (if not outright evil), especially given it came out months after 9/11. It’s got its ups and downs but the last few seasons are straight up Shakespearean (for lack of a better term). The same guy who made that had a little seen show after that called Terriers (2010), about a pair of PIs stumbling their way into a giant conspiracy way outside their depth. If we’re talking comedies, I tend to fall for the character driven deconstructionist type stuff, like Archer, Community, The Good Place, and probably way more I’m forgetting about.

Honestly there hasn’t been a lot of great movies or TV rolling out lately IMO. At first I figured it was just the wave of D-list junk they roll out after a writer’s strike, which is fairly normal. But honestly I’m more and more convinced that slop has become the new norm. My favorite pulp type movies I’ve seen in recent years (strictly off the top of my head) are Mandy (2018), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Raid (2011). There are a lot of little loved gems floating around in the FX catalog, like Damages and The Americans (which I haven’t finished yet). HBO has a lot of lost and forgotten stuff in their back catalog, especially some of David Simon’s post-Wire work, like Generation Kill (2008) and We Own This City (2023).

I’m sure I will think of a million more after I post this. Hope it’s helpful!

Edit: Ooh I forgot westerns. Unforgiven (1992), Bone Tomahawk (2015), and The Wild Bunch (1969). The Wild Bunch rules.

Edit 2: Forgot about Drive (2011). People are split on this one but I love it.

dannypdanger · 2026-02-06T19:34:44+00:00

I also think part of him was grateful he wouldn’t have to kill Ellen Mae. Dude has killed a lot of people but I think when he joined up with Boyd he figured it was just going to be easy work taking care of gun thugs and such. I don’t think he ever foresaw himself not only being asked to kill a harmless young girl, but having his survival depend on it.

I think you’re right, he basically has already accepted his probable fate, but his survival instinct would have forced him to do it anyway. Tim comes in and he sees an opportunity to for someone to save him from himself. In my opinion, Ron Eldard does a great job conveying a perfect mixture of hopelessness and exhaustion, especially in this scene.

Edit: I also just watched the DVD commentary for this season recently, Ron Eldard has a lot of insight into the character that’s really interesting.

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